So it goes #57, 58, 59

I just finished my undergraduate degrees, and decided to get something to remind me that things are not always in my control.

This belongs to mleisrad.

I had this famous line tattooed onto my ankle four years after my grandfather died. One week prior to his death, I read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. These two events marked a significant point in my life where I gained a new perspective on life, death and loss. In this passage, Vonnegut puts into words what I cannot.

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.

The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes.”

This tattoo continues to helps me cope with any loss, by reminding me that everything is forever; what may not be seen is still there.

It’s done in my handwriting. I got it to remind myself that sometimes shit falls apart. It happens. Everything can hit the fan and tear my life to shreds; it’s happened before and it will again and I have no control over it. Like the Tralfamadorians say, it simply is. But I can handle it. I always have. So it Goes.